Flyover Country Ch. 03

I took them without a word and draped them over a low hanging limb. They were still warm from her body.

"And, Matt?" she called just as I was about to climb back inside.

"Mmmmmm?"

"You should hang your jeans and that scratchy shirt out there too. Everything works best if you're sharing body heat, skin on skin, you know?" she asked in a low, melodic voice.

Well, I did know mylar blankets worked best that way—in direct contact with the skin. I didn't have a clue whether that applied to skin on skin in a sleeping bag or not. It did sound like a good idea though.

I doffed my blue jeans and wool shirt and stood for a moment in the darkness in only my boxers and socks. It got chilly quickly, so I slipped inside Sharon's tent. Then I took my socks off, and deposited them outside before zipping the entrance way shut behind me.

I twisted around on my knees to find Sharon on her back wearing her panties and ... well, heck! "Ahhhh ... shouldn't you keep your...?"

"Have you ever worn a bra all night long?" she wondered.

"Well ... no," I replied quietly. The woman was hot. Her breasts were bigger than they'd looked like with her shirt and cold weather gear on. They were beautiful, round globes perched high on her chest. Her nipples were already hard from the cool night air. Lying there, flat on her back, exposed the generous flare of her hips and that barely panty-clad secret place between her thighs. I was probably drooling a little bit.

"Come to bed, Matt," Sharon told me matter-of-factly.

I did, sliding deep into the sleeping bag. Sharon drew the open edge of the top over herself and me as she turned on her right side and into me. She cuddled into me, her nipples burning twin holes in my chest. She reached behind my shoulder and tugged the top of the sleeping bag into place.

I was on my left side facing her, she was on her right side, and we were snuggled up to each other as naturally as if we'd done it for years. Her arms went around my neck comfortably.

We spent the next few minutes kissing, soft gentle kisses that had some heat, but weren't terribly demanding. My left arm was under her neck and my right around her shoulders.

"You know...," she murmured softly, "...you could have been in my ... sleeping bag ... last night, if you'd said the right words—like, 'you wanta do something naughty?'—or something like that."

I didn't know what she wanted to hear from me, so I went with the truth.

"I want our first time to be something we both decide to do and when we both know it's time, we probably won't need any "right" words," I answered quietly.

Sharon levered herself up on her right elbow and in the light of the rising moon, looked me dead in the eyes. I guess she found what she was searching for because she kissed me gently, lay back on her side and sighed contentedly. We slept the whole night in each other's arms and woke in the same position. I got more kisses then.

* * *

"Hey, Matt! Whaddya want me to do with this big box?" Spence yelled. He, Spencer, had told everyone he preferred the short version of his first name. He was in the rear of the Otter, helping to salvage anything that even MIGHT be useful from the interior of the aircraft.

At first, I didn't know what he was talking about. Then I saw him lifting a large package from the last seat in the passenger cabin and hold it up. It appeared to be moderately heavy.

I adjusted the heavy pistol on my hip. A lot of people in Alaska openly carry weapons, but I wasn't quite used to it yet. "Darned if I know...," I called to Spence, "Bring it on out and let's see what it is."

I remembered when I saw it laying on the ground in front of me. The boss had entrusted a package to me for delivery to an old friend working in a drilling company in the Anwar oil reserve. When I'd tried to contact him from the resort, it turned out he'd gone home three days before I'd flown up. I was carrying the box back to Anchorage, but it would never get there now.

Turned out the package was full of white bars of soap and toothpaste. We divided all of the box's contents and put our shares in our backpacks.

* * *

We spent the whole second day getting more comfortable with our little patch of wilderness. Reverend Anderson, he asked us all to call him Parker, proved to be a zealot for fishing. He took charge of the gill nets that were in my survival gear and caught us plenty of fish for dinner. In fact, what he'd caught would have fed a crew twice our size, so we didn't have to use any of our precious freeze-dried meals that night and we were all comfortably full.

Sharon and I shared her sleeping bag and tent again that night. None of the married couples seemed to notice the two single members of the group were bonding quite nicely. It was a comfortable arrangement for me, and I think Sharon, too.

* * *

The next day was our third as survivors in the remoteness of somewhere in Alaska, or maybe we were in northwestern Canada. It started out as had our second day, except everyone was getting restless. At lunch, which was more fish broiled on flat rocks placed in the hot coals of our fire, I brought up the subject I'd been avoiding for the last two days.

We weren't going to be rescued, I told them, because we were too far away from any reasonable search area. Then I broached the idea that we were going to have to save ourselves; we were going to have to hike out of the mountains to civilization.

It went over well. They were all intelligent adults and the facts of our situation were self-evident. Actually, things went so well, I didn't have to convince anyone. We began splitting up gear and putting it in our backpacks as a test to see just what we could carry on a long distance trek.

I had the only big backpack; everyone else had little more than daypacks they'd used in their expedition to view the caribou herds and such. I would be carrying more than "my" share of the community belongings. On the other hand, my backpack's carrying harness was designed to distribute the load and it was probably as comfortable to carry fifty or sixty pounds of gear inside it as it was to carry twenty-five pounds in their daypacks.

I was hefting my backpack, getting ready to sling it on my back when I heard an earsplitting scream from the camp behind me. "AAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

I whirled around as fast as I could, shrugging my arms out of the backpack's shoulder straps. That scream was one of unadulterated terror—you can't mistake it. I let the pack fall behind me, undid the leather strap holding my .357 revolver in the holster and drew it as fast as I could. I wasn't Marshal Dillon, but I think I got it out pretty darn quick.

There was a bear just the other side of the camp, not one of those cute little black bears that only weigh a two or three hundred pounds. This was a grizzly—big fella—eight feet tall when standing on his hind legs and maybe eight or nine hundred pounds. He was coming into camp between Sharon's tent and the Delaney's brightly colored one, just ambling through—until the scream. Then he got a little upset. Standing straight up, he tested the air with his nose and apparently didn't like what he smelled. From his reaction, we were invading his territory and he didn't like it.

Everyone on that side of the campfire was busting ass getting to this side. Mr. Bear didn't like the fire one bit, and shied away from it. Avoiding the fire pit put him on a collision course with me, and I didn't like that.

Using a two-handed grip, the way I was taught, I began firing, trying to hit the monster in the head. Anywhere else, he'd just absorb the bullets and keep coming. Shooting at his head wasn't much better; it was like rifle rounds glancing off a main line of battle tank and it only served to piss him off even more. He opened his cavernous maw and began roaring—and that gave me my only chance. I'd heard of grizzlies being killed with tiny .22 rounds if the rounds went in an eye and rattled around in the beast's skull, thoroughly scrambling its brain.

I was trying to duplicate that, using the much bigger target of his open mouth. I wanted to chip a front tooth with a .357 round that would smash right on through to his brain pan and put him down for the count. His head was moving, though. Even at a range of less than thirty feet, it wasn't easy to put a bullet where I wanted it. He took all six rounds from my pistol and I scrambled backward, opening the cylinder and trying to find the loose cartridges I'd dumped in my jacket pocket.

Abruptly, the rifle I'd included with my survival gear was thrust in front of me. I grabbed it from Sharon, who relieved me of my pistol at the same time. Her hand was digging in my pocket as I was turning around with the rifle.

The Remington 700 is a bolt action rifle so I couldn't fire it as fast as I'd sent .357 rounds downrange. On the other hand, when a 300 magnum bullet hits something, it does major league damage—even to eight-foot tall grizzlies.

Mr. Grizzly didn't like the first shot which careened off the top of his skull, or the second one either which chipped a piece of bone off his left forehead. The magazine only held three rounds so, giving up trying to hit his mouth, I put the third one in this magazine right on his sternum. It rocked him badly.

He staggered, pawed at the wound a bit, then kept coming. I dropped the magazine out. I didn't have another one ready—there was a spare in my backpack, but I doubted we had time to find it. I'd would have to load some rounds in the magazine I had now, and just hope the grizzly would back off while I did that.

Sharon pushed my revolver back in my hands and took the rifle. I had to close the distance so I stepped forward a few paces. Mr. Griz noticed that and shuffled his bulk around to face me. I wanted the bullets moving on an upward trajectory so I knelt on the forest floor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sharon at my side, holding the rifle at the ready. She must've somehow found the spare magazine in my pack and reloaded.

I had to fire slowly, taking care to aim and exercising good trigger discipline. Squeeze the round off—that's what they always say. I was doing my best as the big brown bear shuffled painfully forward. I was willing to bet the bullet over his heart was going to kill him; it just wouldn't kill him fast enough.

My third shot went in right at the upper gum line. Angling upward as it tumbled, the bullet did what I needed it to do. The grizzly was instantly dead on his feet, his brain destroyed. The beast collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, no more than twelve feet from where I was kneeling.

* * *

An hour later, we made a decision to leave this campsite behind and not come back. I suggested that option as something to be discussed, but it was treated as a parliamentary motion made and carried. Everyone began implementing it by breaking camp immediately.

The bear had been bleeding for a while. While my earlier pistol rounds hadn't killed him, he'd immediately begun spraying blood all over the place. Now there was blood pooling under him from the rifle rounds and lots of brain matter and blood from the head wounds splashed all around. It was a mess. My thought was that predators and scavengers were going to be coming from miles around to join in the feast. That image took root and flourished in all our minds.

We disassembled all the tents and stowed them as we'd practiced doing before the grizzly came upon us, lashing them to the top of our backpacks. All our other gear went in the backpacks themselves, our pockets or tied to the outside of the packs. Without pausing to look back, we got moving in a vaguely southwest direction, aiming at an easily identifiably peak on the horizon.

* * *

We kept moving until the sun made a dive for the western horizon. We paused for an hour, built a fire and boiled water from a creek in our aluminum buckets and mixed it into our freeze-dried meal pouches. After we ate, we put the fire out and trekked on for another hour until the deepening twilight began causing problems seeing our footing and keeping to a direction of travel. We washed up in the creek as best we could; the soap we'd scrounged from the box in the plane helped immensely by improving our punctured confidence and morale.

There was a bald knoll a short distance from our intended path and we climbed to the top of it to set up our tents. None of us wanted to give any critter any cover to get closer to us than absolutely necessary tonight. We gathered enough firewood to last a while and built a big fire. We didn't especially need the warmth; we just wanted a well-lit, albeit small, space in the wilderness around us.

* * *

When I crawled in the tent, Sharon was lying flat on her sleeping bag unabashedly naked and with her thighs spread wide. She didn't say a word, and neither did I. I was out of my boxers in an instant and lying next to her in the next.

She didn't want any soft kissing or caressing strokes. "No...," she whispered when I tried to touch her mons and begin to make love to her. "Put it in me, Matt ... I need you right now..." So I did what she wanted. She was definitely wet enough. Sharon grabbed my cock and deftly slid it in through her pussy lips and into her vagina. I plowed deep with one smooth thrust.

"Uuuuunnnnnnnggggghhhhhhhh!" she moaned in a strangled voice. "Oh, God ... deeper, Matt ... more..." The deeper I plunged, the higher her knees rose in the air. She locked her ankles behind my kidneys and used her legs to power me deeper inside.

There wasn't any art to what we were doing; we weren't making love. We were two human beings celebrating our survival with the oldest ritual in the book, reaffirming with each other we were still alive when we might not should have been.

Sharon came hard, groaning into a corner of her sleeping bag she'd stuffed in her mouth to muffle her screams. When I felt her pussy beginning to clamp down on me, I came too, pumping a torrent of cum inside her every time her vagina fluttered.

I slowed down, all my weight back on my haunches, but I didn't stop. Sharon planted her feet firmly on the sleeping bag-covered floor of the tent. I drove into her firmly, but not harshly. As soon as she recovered from her first climax, she began working for another one.

I sped up a little, powering my cock deep inside with more abandon and she responded by slinging her cunt up at me to engulf more and more of my hard-on. In a few more minutes, we were pounding each other again, scaling the heights for another climax.

When we finished, Sharon wearily pulled the upper corner of her sleeping back over the two of us and we nestled against each other, her breath warm on my chest and me breathing in the scent of her hair.

Toward dawn, Sharon woke me up riding atop me and whimpering softly as she did her best to keep quiet. When we both came, she folded forward on my body and that's the way we went back to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

"We're going to have to sleep in your sleeping bag tonight while mine airs out some," Sharon told me with a mischievous grin the next morning.

"But mine's just a little bigger than a regular single bag ... it isn't a big double, like yours," I objected.

"So...?" she replied with a little giggle. I got it; it wasn't like we spent our nights squirming around, trying to get away from each other as we slept. And if I could avoid it, I didn't want to lie in a big wet spot either. Her bag did need airing out—it really, really did.

It wasn't the only sleeping bag in camp that required airing that morning. Sharon and I hadn't noticed, but apparently all of the other couples in camp had done a lot of reaffirming their humanity and continued existence in the face of deadly peril also. We were all a little tired, but we were feeling just fine. Everyone grinned at each other.

We heated creek water in our two aluminum buckets—they didn't hold but about a gallon each—mixed the boiling water with cool water and then did what we could to wash off last night's activities. That began a practice we kept in place for all the days ahead, that of keeping as clean as we could in the circumstances in which we found ourselves. The soap we'd found in the package loaded on the rear seat in the plane helped enormously. Cleaning up cost us a couple of hours, but it was worth it.

Washing ourselves off began another custom too. We paid no attention to the normal rules of modesty. For one thing, living so closely, being modest was a losing proposition, anyway. Second, we weren't over the bear attack, and had no intention of ever getting over it. We dug holes for our waste products and whenever someone had to use the "facilities" someone else had to stand guard. At least, we thought it was necessary—and we didn't see any need of discussing the issue.

Modesty took another blow when it became apparent that we were going to be stripping down every night in preparation for sleep. No one wanted to sleep in the same clothes we'd sweated in all day long, if we could avoid it. Getting nude every night meant we would get up the next morning sans clothing, and then we'd don "fresh" shirts and pants in the daylight, outside the tents.

All of the tents were low-silhouette, lightweight hiking tents and barely had enough room for two people lying down—there was no head room to change inside—so we changed our clothes in public. We all had some changes of clothing with us and we rinsed soiled garments in the river, but that only went so far.

We never heard a word of protest from the Reverend Parker Anderson, our twenty-seven-year-old resident theologian. In fact, he and his wife, Michelle, were doing the same thing the rest of us were. I liked Parker. He never seemed to get down on himself or our situation and was always ready to talk to anyone who was dispirited.

I asked him if I could call him "Padre" because I'd read somewhere or other, the chaplain aboard Navy ships in WWII, regardless of their religious order, were normally addressed by that title. Parker didn't mind a bit and the salutation, Padre, caught on in the group right from the start. It just felt right.

* * *

The day after the bear attack was our first full day on the trail, hiking from we-didn't-know-where in a vague direction toward civilization and safety. We'd rushed all yesterday afternoon, trying to put as much distance between us and the dead bear as we could. We succeeded, but there were a lot of sore legs and achy backs that first morning on the trail. We probably didn't make ten miles that first full day of hiking, though we were on the move for twelve hours. It was comparatively easy, walking near (but not beside) a river for most of the way. That was good. We needed easy going for a while until we worked ourselves into good condition.

We were lucky in that we were all pretty fit, for a normal group of men and women, but our daily lives before this adventure had not included long distance hiking. It took our bodies a couple of weeks to adjust to the physical stress of always being on the move in the daylight, climbing or descending ridges, and scrambling over boulders when our path forced us to negotiate the river's shoreline. Three weeks after we started out, though, we had all settled into a routine and no longer had to fight tired, tender muscles every morning.

Individual traits began to surface. Penny Martin, who worked in banking, as did her husband, had competed in track and field in high school, and she'd kept running as an adult. She found it easy to acclimate herself to hiking all day long and she could probably have put all of us under the horizon every day if she'd exerted herself.

Her husband, Lyle, was another avid fisherman and he took his turn with the gill nets. Between him and the Padre, anytime we were near a creek or river, we had fish to eat, courtesy of their expertise.